Billie Holiday

by John Szwed

  The original version of “Gloomy Sunday,” a 1933 Hungarian song by Rezso Seress with lyrics by László Jávor, is very different from what was heard by most people outside of Hungary. That earlier version was set in the Great Depression during the rise of fascism in Hungary, possibly predicting the coming of World War II in Europe:

  Cities are being wiped out, shrapnel is making music

  Meadows are colored red with human blood

  The first recordings of “Gloomy Sunday” in English were all made within a month of each other in 1936, but by then the British lyricist Desmond Carter had reset the song as a message from the grave by a departed lover:

  They bore me to church and I left you behind me

  My eyes could not see one I wanted to love me

  It was this version on a recording by Paul Robeson that was initially banned in the UK. But then, in a strange act of aesthetic nationalism, the BBC’s director of music declared that it could be sung on radio—but only by a British singer. It could also be played by an orchestra, but never by a dance band.

  The first American recording was made in 1936 by Bob Allen, a singer with the Hal Kemp Orchestra, a band certainly not known for songs with heavy subjects. It was also recorded that year in a swing dance tempo by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra with the singer Johnny Hauser, as well as, in a sober salon mood, by Hildegard, a supper club singer who, though born and raised in Adell, Wisconsin, styled herself as a worldly chanteuse and was a favorite of Eleanor Roosevelt and Liberace. Four years later Artie Shaw recorded it with Pauline Byrne as a bluesy dance tune whose final chorus has the orchestra sounding like Cab Calloway’s in a Betty Boop cartoon.

  By the time Billie Holiday released her version of it in 1941 (perhaps prompted by Shaw’s recording), the song had been simplified and restructured by lyricist Sam M. Lewis. Like all the previous versions, it was in a minor key:

  Gloomy is Sunday, with shadows I spend it all

  My heart and I have decided to end it all

  It was sung at a funereal pace with the addition of five new lines and a change of key from minor to major that softened the song with a 1940s B-movie finale in which the survivor says that she or he was only dreaming, and the loved one is still alive and only sleeping.

  The Holiday recording became the source for at least sixty or more versions by everyone from Ricky Nelson to Jimmy Smith (with a funky organ treatment), Ray Charles to Elvis Costello, Sinéad O’Connor to Björk, who first recorded it with a Miles Davis soundalike solo by Mark Isham, and later sang it dressed as an angel at designer Alexander McQueen’s funeral at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London following his suicide.

  Two recent films have reactivated the legend surrounding the song: Gloomy Sunday (Germany, 1999), in which a doomed love affair is connected to the Holocaust (perhaps inspired by the use of “God Bless the Child” on the soundtrack of Schindler’s List) and uses the original version of the song; and The Kovak Box (U.S., 2006), a thriller/fantasy film in which the Holiday recording is used to drive victims to their deaths when played over the telephone.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Songs II

  It is usually assumed that it was Billie Holiday’s move from Vocalion to Commodore and Decca Records that led to a change in her singing style and in her choice of songs. But it was clear even in her last recordings with Columbia-associated labels that she was already headed in a new direction. Just before “Gloomy Sunday,” she had recorded “God Bless the Child,” “Am I Blue?,” “Jim” (with its reference to carrying a torch), and “Until the Real Thing Comes Along” (her last session with the several different record labels owned by Columbia), on which she is reunited with Teddy Wilson. She was already a different singer than she had been in their earlier recordings.

  • • • • •

  “God Bless the Child” has of late been turning up in numerous films and at funerals and national events, and is rapidly becoming a secular hymn, much like John Lennon’s “Imagine.” It’s safe to say, though, that virtually no one knows exactly what this song is about. For years guesses have been made at the meaning of both the title and the lyrics. While Billie claimed it was based on a passage in the Bible, the relevant verse has not yet been found. Matthew 25:29, sometimes called “The Parable of the Talents,” has been suggested: “For everyone who has will be given more and he will have abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.” But as is true of much biblical exegesis, that passage has been subject to many different interpretations, none of which, however, seems to fit the song. More puzzling is the title, which is also the key line of the song. Assuming that the song speaks of disparities between those who have and those who don’t, and that children are always dependent on adults “who have,” why would God bless the child who “has”? The title of the song, which was supplied by Holiday, may be better read as “God Blessed the Child (That’s Got Its Own),” and a notation on the original sheet music supports that interpretation: “‘God Bless’ the Child,’ a swing Spiritual, is based on the authentic proverb ‘God Blessed the Child That’s Got His Own.’” But no proverb similar to the song’s title has yet been discovered, either.

  Use of the apostrophe in “bless’” and the subtitle with “blessed” makes better sense of the song and suggests that perhaps it may have been either dialect usage or a mishearing of Holiday by the song’s composer, Arthur Herzog Jr., later corrected, with both titles left on the cover. Herzog said that the song was rushed together in order to take advantage of a boycott by NBC and CBS of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), which was seeking higher royalty rates for music played on the radio. For ten months radio stations could not play anything or anyone ASCAP represented, and were forced to come up with folk songs, marches, or any music so old that it had never been copyrighted. Herzog saw this situation as an opportunity for new songs not yet registered with ASCAP to get heavy airplay, and so he asked Billie to help him create one. He said he wanted her to give him “an old-fashioned Southern expression” that could be turned into a song; she suggested “God bless’ the child.” When he asked her what it meant, she replied that when the adults in a family all had money and a child had none, “God bless’ the child that’s got his own.” The song took twenty minutes to write, he said, and he wrote both the words and music. Billie contributed only the key line and asked to have one note moved down a half step. But then he contradicted himself by adding, “She has never written a line of words or music.”

  Holiday recalled the moment differently. The title of the song was, in her description, something she had said to her mother after she had turned Billie down when she asked for money. Billie resented being denied because she had been keeping her mother’s restaurant solvent by underwriting it. She had been angry about the incident for three weeks, until one day, while reliving it, that phrase came back to her and “the whole damn song fell into place in my head.” She then called Herzog, and the two of them sat at the piano in Café Society while she sang it and he picked it out on the piano. “We changed the lyrics in a couple of spots, but not much.”

  Neither of these accounts seems quite right. There are certainly African American songs built on proverbs, biblical passages, and folk expressions, such as “I’ve been down three times” (in “Drowning in the Sea of Love”), “Knock on Wood,” “Only the Strong Survive,” and the like. It seems unlikely, however, that Herzog would have asked her to choose a “Southern” phrase as a basis for a song, or that he or they could have composed an entire song, words and music, from that kernel in twenty minutes. The original sheet music for the piece credits both Herzog and Holiday, but the composer is not identified. (BMI—a rival performing rights organization to ASCAP—does cite both Herzog and Holiday as composers and lyricists.) On other occasions, Herzog would say that Billie brought in a sheet of finished music, but that neither of them knew who had written it. Both of them were apparently w
illing to give the other only the smallest amount of credit for his or her respective work.

  • • • • •

  Billie makes a point of describing the origin of “Don’t Explain” in Lady Sings the Blues. It arose, she wrote, from a particular moment at the end of her relationship with her husband Jimmy Monroe. She typically situated songs she had written or cowritten in her own experience.

  Herzog, though, says that he wrote two versions of the lyrics, the first with some “blue” material in it, and that when Decca did not want to issue it, they rerecorded it using the second version. He claimed that Billie briefly mixed up the two versions. No recording of the song with objectionable material is known to exist, but the first, a 1944 recording, has in the second stanza the line “You mixed with some dame,” and in the 1945 recording it is replaced with “What is there to gain” and a few other minor variations. The 1945 recording is much slower and contains repeats of some of the stanzas, but otherwise it’s unclear why Decca would rerecord the same song within a year.

  Herzog was also annoyed with her for recording “Tell Me More and More and Then Some” in 1940 and claiming credit for writing both music and words. She had come up with the tune and was excited to record it until Danny Mendelsohn told her it was too similar to “St. James Infirmary,” a song with roots in the eighteenth-century broadside ballad “The Unfortunate Rake,” and was known in all sorts of variations, such as “Streets of Laredo,” “The Bad Girl’s Lament,” and as a blues. No problem, said Billie, and told Danny to change it a bit. Whatever her original version sounded like, the one she recorded was different enough to justify copyrighting it as an original song.

  • • • • •

  In 1942 Capitol Records was created in Hollywood by songwriters Johnny Mercer and Buddy DeSylva, along with Glenn Wallichs, an executive in an electronics firm. In spite of their slim chances of competing with the three biggest record companies, Victor, Decca, and Columbia, they became hugely successful and signed some of the biggest stars in the music business. The first few singles they produced featured the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, a once powerful group in the music world but still a big enough name, if a dated one, that they hoped would help launch them nationally. Whiteman and Holiday seem like an unlikely pairing: His name and the PR slogan hung on him, “the King of Jazz,” didn’t sit well with jazz fans after the 1930s. But his deep involvement with George Gershwin, his excellent choice of singers and musicians (including Bing Crosby and Bix Beiderbecke), his employment of African American arrangers, and his recording with Paul Robeson suggest that he was not quite what his reputation suggested.

  “Trav’lin’ Light” was an instrumental tune by trombonist Trummy Young that he played with the Earl Hines band in the 1930s with no name and no arrangement. When Young learned that his old friend Jimmy Munday was arranging music for Paul Whiteman, he asked Jimmy to make an arrangement of it and suggested that Whiteman record it. Johnny Mercer heard the band rehearsing it and added words and a title, and since Billie was in Los Angeles at the time, Whiteman wanted to have her record it with him. Since she was still technically under contract to Columbia, she was listed as “Lady Day” on the record label.

  Billie had come to LA because her husband, Jimmy Monroe, had been arrested for drug smuggling, and while he was on trial she found work at the Trouville Club. When he was found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail, she stayed on at the club. By the time she and Whiteman recorded “Trav’lin’ Light,” she was on the verge of being put out of her hotel for not paying her bills. Afterward the matter was made right, she and Trummy went out to celebrate, and she wired her mother to send her money to return to New York.

  This onetime performance on record with Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra on June 12, 1942, seemed to have made little impression when it first appeared. She did not sing “Trav’lin’ Light” very often, but it grew in popularity and significance over the years until it seemed to become one of her signature pieces. It also offers a very clear and vivid example of Billie’s improvisational ability.

  The recording is spare and pensive, and begins abruptly, with no introduction, the melody played straight by Skip Layton on a muted trombone. (Layton is given credit on the record label as a soloist, a very unusual gesture, especially for such a short performance.) The arrangement uniquely frames Holiday between the brief opening solo and a closing one also played by Layton, and allows the listener to hear how she paraphrases the melody and makes subtle changes in its rhythm, never quite following but only suggesting what was written by Young or played by the trombonist. Holiday’s improvisational artistry is so compelling here that most people who remember the song recall her revision of it as the way it was actually written. (A very different performance of the song from Paris in 1959 can also be seen on YouTube.)

  Just after it was recorded, the American Federation of Musicians banned all recording activity by its union members because the record companies would not agree to the union’s demand that their discs not be played on jukeboxes or the radio without compensation. When no agreement was reached, there were no recordings made until 1944, so “Trav’lin’ Light” was Billie’s last studio recording for almost two years, with the exception of a few V-Discs recorded for use on military bases.

  • • • • •

  “I’ll Be Seeing You” was written for a short-lived 1938 Broadway show and was first recorded soon after its closing by the supper club singer Hildegard. When her recording was rereleased in 1943, perhaps in an attempt to recast it as a wartime letter from home, a number of other singers also quickly made their own versions. Bing Crosby was the first, going into the studio in the second week of January 1944. He promoted the song on his weekly NBC Kraft Music Hall, and the record reached the Billboard charts three months later, becoming the number one seller by July, remaining in that position for four weeks. Holiday recorded the song on April 1, 1944, and though it never reached the charts, it sold a respectable number of records. Frank Sinatra’s up-tempo version reached number four in May 1944 and stayed on the charts for seventeen weeks. It was the last song he recorded with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, so it may also have been heard as a parting song to the band.

  The seldom sung verse that starts the song places it in Paris in April, and as with “April in Paris,” it’s the magic of the city that drives the song. The “I” and “you” of it are viewed through locales and settings as if two people who merely passed on the street might have caught each other’s eye for only a second, and in the spirit of Baudelaire’s poem “À une passante,” they nonetheless knew they could be lovers. But since none of the popular recordings included the verse, it left the personae and their relationship up to the imagination of the listeners. (Some also say they can hear the origins of this song in the final movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony, which Mahler had originally titled “What Love Tells Me.”) Since “I’ll Be Seeing You” was very short, even when sung as slowly as Holiday chose to do, she repeated the second eight lines of the lyric to fill out a three-and-a-half-minute recording, but when she sang it live she usually kept to the original sixteen lines.

  It is a song that has had a long life, recorded by vocalists as diverse as country singer Brenda Lee, Gene Pitney, the Carpenters, Rickie Lee Jones, doo-wop groups such as the Five Satins, and most notably in a duet by French chanteuse Françoise Hardy and Iggy Pop. It was the basis for a movie of the same name, in which a soldier suffering from battle fatigue meets and falls in love with a young woman who is on furlough for the Christmas holidays. It also appeared in the final episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and in an episode of Beavis and Butthead. Despite not having been one of the hit versions in its time, Holiday’s recording is the one most often heard seventy years later.

  Fifty-second Street

  The cluster of jazz clubs on West Fifty-second Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues and spilling over toward Seventh in New York City was a midtown Manhattan parallel to the Harlem cabar
ets. The clubs came about as part of a shift in spending and investment in entertainment once Prohibition was repealed at the end of 1933 and later again when the Depression began to ease. They were small, maybe fifteen feet by sixty feet, and were located in the basements of brownstone residences. They featured miniature tables for a few dozen people, little space for dancing, and no air-conditioning. Small-band jazz was born and raised here: music without amplification, with sonic qualities that suited the spaces in which it emerged. Sitting so close to a band and a singer, one could hear the sizzle and rattle of cymbals, the deep thump of a bass drum, the mix of air and sound coming from the horns, the depth and resonance of the piano, the breathing of a singer, all features that recordings never manage to capture. It was the musical equivalent of the deep blacks and silvery whites of 1950s photography, an acoustic reality lost to us as musicians and listeners, dependent as we all are on amplification, mixing, filtering, recording, the dry ice of digitization, and monster video screens.

  It was a time and place for experimentation, and small bands were often assembled for a single night. There was no clear musical orthodoxy in these clubs, none of the constraints on age, era, or musical politics that we have seen in our own times. It was possible to move from club to club cheaply and with ease, hear musics of different styles and eras, and see musicians of different persuasions working together. The whole history of jazz was on display. Both fans and musicians moved freely on this street congested with music, some visiting their colleagues on their break, others trying to squeeze as much playing or listening as possible into a single night. Sometimes bands ended their sets by marching through the audience and out onto the street. Even the clubs moved, some as many as five times within a block or two, jockeying for advantage. It was the kind of organic aesthetic that could be found only in Manhattan and New Orleans, the mix that no city planners or arts czars have since been able or willing to create. Not that it was heaven for all. A few clubs actively discouraged black customers unless they were famous, and some ugly scenes involving soldiers and musicians occasionally erupted.